


in our younger days we believed that we had the world in our hands. we were wrong, but you wanted me anyway

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Getting Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 21:57:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20122336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: This is an undying declaration of love towards Tsukishima Kei who did not accept the roses I gave him back in our second year of high school even though I had been very serious about wanting to court him and admired his playing form and snarky personality passionately. I think I am in love with him and his hair and his weird Google search history.





	in our younger days we believed that we had the world in our hands. we were wrong, but you wanted me anyway

**Author's Note:**

> au in which tsukishima and kuroo are the same age

“Might fuck around, go to college, make you fall in love with me, I dunno,” is Kuroo’s offhand response when Kei asks him _ what are you going to do after graduation. _This is not informative at all. Kuroo is clearly going to college, and he has spent his entire life fucking around with the people who have had the misfortune of making his acquaintance so he may as well have told Kei that rice is real. The last part is just Kuroo being his usual flamboyant self and is similarly useless. Kei sighs. He had been hoping to find out exactly where Kuroo was going, and therefore to figure out if he was going to be able to stay in Tokyo or be left with no choice but to catch a last minute flight on a budget airline to Europe and never come back. That would make it much easier for Kei to give up on him.

After all, Kei is going to Tokyo after he leaves Karasuno. He has very good reason to give up on Kuroo.

“That was not informative at all,” he says.

Kuroo grins, leans over the table into Kei’s space. His dark messy hair casts a sharp shadow over Kei’s unwrapped burger, and Kei’s eyes follow the trajectory of his jacket sleeves as they narrowly avoid a fatal collision with the exposed cheese dip.

“No, I suppose it was not.”

Kei holds up a soggy fry. “Could you make it more informative.”

“Should I?”

Kei pokes him in the cheek with the fry. It crumples immediately, destroyed by the sheer flawlessness that is Kuroo Tetsurou. He had been expecting this.

“Does it matter if I do?” Kuroo continues, his voice less obnoxious now, consciously so. He takes the fry from Kei and sticks it in his mouth thoughtfully. Shrinks back to his side of the booth. The yellow lights overhead are warm like fake suns or weekday mornings. He has that look in his eyes again, the one Kei’s come to recognize over the last three years of their chaotic bullet train-colored friendship as the one he gets when he’s thinking really hard about something and working equally hard to hide it. Because Kuroo has a reputation to maintain as being cool and aloof. Because Kuroo doesn’t like to be caught being earnest.

Which is why they’re here right now to begin with. Kuroo won’t tell him what the fuck he’s doing with his life and Kei won’t ask because he’s too furiously in love with him and too fucking bad at being emotionally vulnerable to put him on the spot like that. It’s not like he’s come all the way down to Tokyo in the immediate sizzling aftermath of their final exams to declare his undying love for him— Tsukishima Kei is not that kind of person. But he has a heart, too.

“You tell me, Kuroo.” He sips at his fizzy Aquarius; Kuroo watches him through lazy, hooded eyes.

Silence. Kuroo reaches for another fry.

//

[23:44] catass

sorry about eating all your fries i’ll pay you back next time

[23:47] tsukishima

nvm it’s fine

[draft] [23:48] tsukishima

about the college thing. you’re serious right. where are u going

[draft] [23:49] tsukishima

you know i

//

Tsukishima Kei is on a mission to get rejected by Kuroo because he’s done some elementary school research on heartbreak and all its glorious side-effects and he has decided that this simply isn’t worth it. He doesn’t like the fact that Kuroo is being deliberately evasive and turning up to all of their once-monthly meetings exactly seven minutes late, but he’s never been the sort of reckless that tried to turn the tides of history. It goes against his work ethic. Tsukishima Kei does not deal in emotional investment if he can get away with it. At this point Kageyama might frown at him and then shake his head and walk away, while the slightly more astute Hinata would point out to him that he has already gone and invested too much in this whole affair to begin with, so he is actually the one who has played himself. Kei closes his eyes and leans back into his seat on the train.

He isn’t looking for a folk tale ending that’s overly tragic or sappy to the point of sending all its readers to the brink of tears and then back. Kei is eighteen years old, not fifteen and swiftly in denial of the fact that he has feelings; he understands that reality has a tendency to play out more like an entry in someone’s personal diary than a stage drama. Those kinds of stories are reserved for the so-called main characters of life, like horribly astute Hinata and the proverbial anvil that occupies the space inside of Kageyama’s skull. Still, he meets Kuroo again a week and three days later, delighting in and condemning the freedom that leaving high school is beginning to afford him, and wonders.

This time Kuroo is not late. He is frightfully early, to the point where Kei stops walking ten meters away from their designated meeting point in front of the Hachiko statue and pulls out his phone. Kuroo Tetsurou is thirty minutes early to our meeting, he texts Tadashi, the earthquake of his hands doing bizarre earthquake things and forcing him to have to retype his words at least three times before he hits send. Listen to your heart, Tadashi responds cryptically. My heart is telling me to get the fuck away from here, Kei sends back.

“Hey, Tsukki, you’re early.”

Kei’s soul departs. “So are you,” he says, forcing his soul to come back with the force of several imperial armies about to go to war. Kuroo cocks his head to the side, hands shoved in his pockets. He looks like the protagonist of a romantic comedy preserved on Blu-Ray from 2009, and he knows it. It’s not even worth commenting on that he is smiling, seeing how he is always smiling and therefore always twenty-five percent more attractive than he has to be. Kei does not have the strength left in him to be offended, so he asserts his autonomy by pointedly not commenting on Kuroo’s new helix earring, which he has swapped out his usual silver stud for. This is not going to be a comfortable afternoon for his heart.

//

“But it could be,” Kuroo’s saying, pretty hands twisted around an ice cream cone as it melts under his evil Kuroo gaze.

“Sorry, what?”

Kuroo’s expression flickers the way television static jumps when the cable has been pecked at by a pigeon passing by on its way to Australia to seek its destiny. The perpetual glow in his eyes peters out for a split second, but that’s all the indication he gives that he has realized how Kei has not heard a thing he’s said for the last five minutes. Otherwise, his posture is impeccably sloppy and his jeans are impossibly tight. “It’s nothing,” he says, shifting his gaze around the mall. “It’s getting late. I’ll walk you to the station.”

What am I, your boyfriend? Kei catches this thought rearing its ugly, Loch Ness head somewhere inside of his left lung and recognizes it immediately for what it is: a spot of cancer. If he does not eliminate it now, he may never be able to break free from orbiting endlessly around the figurative Mcdonald’s that is Kuroo Tetsurou.

“I’m fine, you don’t need to do that,” he says, casual, and wasn’t that easy. He walks away. Kuroo watches him go.

//

In the winter of their second year Nekoma comes to Miyagi to play, and Kuroo gives him a hand of red roses. What the fuck, Kei says, staring at him in the empty gymnasium, knuckles white around the neatly-tied-up plastic. Kuroo shrugs his shoulders like he’s given Kei a plastic bottle cap or something and then goes out to join the rest of his team. A week later he gets a text from Hinata who has received a text from Kenma who is Kuroo’s best friend in Tokyo, informing him that Kuroo was not joking about the roses but not explaining exactly what he meant either. The whole thing feels terribly contrived to him. At the time Kei is sixteen and probably emotionally repressed and uninterested in anything except for maybe-astrophysics and maybe-volleyball. He cannot be bothered to pause and wonder why Kuroo Tetsurou’s dark messy hair makes his rib cage hurt. As for his eyes, he does not allow his gaze to wander that far. Kuroo’s silhouette is enough to haunt him alone.

//

[draft] [02:39] tsukishima

hi kuroo

[draft] [02:40] tsukishima

i didn’t mean to act like

[draft] [07:15] tsukishima

about that afternoon last week

[draft] [07:59] tsukishima

hinata would laugh at me for this but i’m in love with you you know

[13:11] tsukishima

please let me buy you fries again

[15:14] catass

what the fuck? okay.

//

Three days before he is due to walk onstage and stand in front of an auditorium full of high schoolers’ parents so that his own parents can take a photo of him for austerity purposes and bawl about it afterwards to their relatives, Kei finally comes clean about his grand million dollar plan to escape to Europe and never come back.

“What the fuck?” The guarded look in Kuroo’s eyes disintegrates. Distantly Kei thinks that he actually kind of preferred it when he looked like he was upset and was trying to hide it, because now Kuroo just looks like he wants to cry. He feels eighteen like this, and that’s unnerving; Kuroo belongs with deities. That was why Kei had decided he had to escape to Europe forever in the first place. Because no matter how hard he tried, Kuroo would never look at him the way he dreamed of him in his sleep.

Kuroo is wearing glasses today, even though he has perfect vision. “Why are you wearing glasses?”

“What am I supposed to say to this.” Kuroo ignores him, running his hands through his hair repeatedly like a cat trying to groom itself after walking through a dumpster. “Europe?”

“As in,” Kei cuts in, feeling mean and deceptively level headed. “I wanted to go to Europe because I thought you would decide not to talk to me ever again at some point. But that didn’t work out.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going to Tokyo for college, Kuroo.”

“Can you just tell me that from the start next time?”

“Can you try not to make metaphors out of french fries? It’s very tiring to deal with.”

//

They got worked up over nothing.

Kei’s going to Tokyo for college because he’s a big city boy with big city dreams, and Kuroo’s staying there because he’s a lazy fucking city boy and he’s known this city all his life, so it’s kind of a common sense thing, like changing out his earring every three days or breathing. “What were you expecting from me, a declaration of undying love?” Kuroo pushes his stupid fake glasses up the bridge of his nose and laughs a little hysterically. “Is that what it takes for you to be honest?”

Kei studies the ketchup packet between his forefinger and his thumb. “Maybe.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry?”

“This is an undying declaration of love towards Tsukishima Kei who did not accept the roses I gave him back in our second year of high school even though I had been very serious about wanting to court him and admired his playing form and snarky personality passionately. I think I am in love with him and his hair and his weird Google search history. I would like to spend some quality time with him exploring the dirty unromantic streets of Tokyo in the future if he is not against the idea."

Kei’s soul gets on a plane and hightails it the fuck out of Japan before he can call it back. “Oh,” he says quietly. What’s left of him processes Kuroo’s incredibly verbose confession with Internet Explorer levels of efficiency.

“Oh,” he repeats, his soul settling back in awkwardly somewhere between his horrified heart and the canopy of his ribcage and then happily dying.

He thinks about it. “Can I kiss you?”

“Fuck you,” Kuroo’s laughing with lettuce stuck between his teeth and his pretty firework eyes are spitting fire and he doesn’t look like he wants to cry anymore. “You’ve got ketchup on your cheek. I’m going to lick it off your face.”

Kei thinks that he would not be against that, and then leans across the table and catches Kuroo’s chin with his thumb and forefinger and pulls him in. It’s not a scene from a Ghibli film with gorgeous piano music and atmospheric blue lights and all the willow trees whispering seventeenth century love poems in the faraway fields. Kuroo stumbles because he seriously wanted to lick Kei’s face and their teeth clack together with the force of several imperial armies about to go to war. Kei chokes on a snort.

It’s not the end of a dynasty or the beginning of some glorious new era. It’s just a boy and a boy and a big, dramatic city. And whatever comes after that.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> i wrote this in all of one hour and then spent like 3.5 minutes editing it so if it's a mess, please forgive me for the mess. thank you for reading! i have not been here in a while, but i felt inspired by playing volleyball in pe today like the loser high school student i am and thinking about how 25 points is a fucking lot of points to play for a set. you know when you nail that receive and it makes that sound that goes through your whole body-- asmr. chefs kiss. perfect. haikyuu's been a while! i mean it's been a while since haikyuu. same difference. kinda nasty how i started out reading haikyuu when i was 11 and now i'm facing the signature college crisis that plagues all sports anime. have you seen kazetsuyo? that's another really good sports anime. i was supposed to study tonight  
if you enjoyed this, feel free to leave kudos or comments. but please do what sparks joy for you!
> 
> have a good one


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